A Lucid Thought: Middle Age Sans Female Rage

September 27, 1996|By Mary Schmich.

Thank you, Shannon Lucid.

Thank you for your name, a name so cartoonishly full of life and grit that Danielle Steel would have been proud to dream it up.

Thank you for your earthy wit, which led you to describe life on the Russian space station Mir, where you just spent 188 days, as "like living in a camper in the back of your pickup with your kids . . . when it's raining and no one can get out."

And thank you most of all for being a 53-year-old woman who's making news because she has done something bold and interesting, not because she's mad as hell about what some man has done to her.

The media are bursting these days with tales of women wronged and itching to get even. Across the land, women's anger is scorching movie screens and torching the pages of magazines.

"Revenge!" as the media portray it, is everywoman's war whoop.

Open the paper one day and there's Claire Bloom, the actress, who has just penned a poisonous account of her defunct marriage to the loutish writer Philip Roth. Open the paper the next day, and there's Sondra Locke, the actress, suing the loutish actor Clint Eastwood on charges that he sabotaged her career after they broke up.

Turn any corner and you'll be hit by hype for this week's blockbuster movie, "The First Wives Club," the latest in a wave of revenge chick flicks that includes "Waiting to Exhale" and "Thelma and Louise." In "First Wives," a trio of angry middle-age women retaliate against the loutish former husbands who traded them for younger models.

Women as a group, of course, have plenty of incentive for anger and revenge. Rape, sexual harassment, job discrimination. Salary inequity, domestic violence, an unfair share of poverty. That's the abridged version of wrongs routinely done to women, to which can be added our culture's exploitation of young women's sexuality and its disregard for women who no longer have youthful sex appeal to sell.

Our society's devaluation of older women is such old news, in fact, that that's why it makes news when three women in their 50s--Bette Midler, Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn--manage to carry a Hollywood movie.

As Hawn's character in "The First Wives Club" notes: "There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney and `Driving Miss Daisy.' "

But some of us in the audience squirm at the incessant stream of images of vengeful women. Sure, anger can be cleansing, a veritable Ajax for the soul.

But there's little consolation, and less inspiration, in the sight of so many spite-spitting women aiming their machetes at men's wallets and other precious parts. In the spate of spite-filled tales, women are reduced to creatures who exist only in response to men, their lives directed and defined by men's behavior.

In the fire of women's anger, Shannon Lucid blows through like needed rain.

Lucid grew up in an age in which a woman who dared to dream of flying to the moon wasn't likely to soar beyond the secretary's desk.

The 8th-grade teacher who assured her girls didn't become rocket scientists would have been perplexed to see her spinning through space for longer than any American, or any woman, ever had.

But if her life story is in part one of a woman overcoming obstacles to women, it's a story refreshingly stripped of bitterness. It's a reminder that a woman's middle age is more than a miasma of resentment and revenge.

Hollywood thinks that women wreaking revenge on men is a grand guffaw, and apparently so do lots of women.

But the women I know, including the legitimately angry ones, want images of women as something other than angry. We can't all be astronauts any more than we can all be movie stars, but we can look for and listen to stories in which women do something other than ricochet off men.

In Shannon Lucid, we have an image of a woman marching boldly into middle age. She's who I want to be when I grow up.

And when Hollywood regularly makes movies about women like that, we all will have grown up.